Posted on 09/22/2007 6:37:50 AM PDT by Turret Gunner A20
http://home.peoplepc.com/psp/newsstory.asp?cat=TopStories&referrer=welcome&id=20070922/46f49340_3ca6_1552620070922-1497302150
Lawyer: Fake Bomb Charge an Overreaction
BOSTON - The MIT student who walked into Logan International Airport wearing a computer circuit board and wiring on her sweat shirt claimed it was harmless artwork. But to troopers who arrested her at gunpoint, it was a fake bomb.
Nineteen-year-old Star Simpson was charged Friday with possessing a hoax device. Her attorney described the charge as offbase and "almost paranoid," arguing at a court hearing that she did not act in a suspicious manner and had told an airport worker that the device was art.
(Excerpt) Read more at home.peoplepc.com ...
Try to understand: this was a clerk behind an information counter at an pretty dingy airport who sent up the balloon.
I'm waiting for a picture of this Einstein and their CV to show up........any guesses?
Her name is Maria Moncayo. But good luck on finding out her CV unless this case goes to trial. I predict the charge will be dropped quietly on or before 29 October.
I'd also like to know how many security professionals observed and ignored Star's "bomb jewelery" before Maria spotted it.
Put on a badge I want you to watch over us.
Since she didn't carry a "hoax device", if she pleads or is charged at this point there better be a good reason or reasonable people should conclude the swat team and the authorities are easily manipulated idiots.
Hysteria is not a probable cause.
You see, your mind swings on a hinge. Either she is a terrorist or she was pulling a stunt. There is a third choice - she was innocent of an intentional act to do whatever it is y'all think she was intentionally doing and the whole thing was caused by supposed professionals jumping to a conclusion about what it must be, which turned out to be mistaken.
You see, as so-called professionals, they cannot believe that they duped themselves, and so if they were duped it must have been intentional on her part.
Training, intelligence and humility in the face of being wrong are better solutions than arrogance.
It isn't just the flashing lights. It is the whole thing. Since almost anyone who knows what electronic circuits look like can tell you what it is, they can also tell you what it isn't. It isn't an IED, and it is not that it doesn't conform to my idea of an IED. It is that it isn't an IED. An explosive has to have certain components which this quite evidently doesn't have. For instance it needs to have explosives. This doesn't.
But she's not being charged with making a real bomb. She's charged with making a hoax bomb. If you wanted to freak people out and have a laugh at their expense, making a hollywood light-show hoax bomb is the way to do it, not making a reasonable facsimile of a real bomb and hiding it under your jacket. What would that have accomplished?
“From looking at it, I don’t think she intended it to look like a bomb. It was more of a “geek” thing. Probably not the brightest thing to do, though.”
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If you don’t think she wanted it to look like a bomb, do you think she wanted it to look like.. a ukelele?
No one needs to jump to a conclusion that she was innocent. After stopping her, not finding explosives, and understanding that they had misled themselves into believing what wasn't a bomb was a bomb, they could just conclude that because she was innocent she was innocent.
A tautology is a tautology, and 9/11 did not change the nature of logic. What is dangerous is to think that 9/11 somehow changed the moral landscape and that not not innocent is somehow different from innocent.
What I deride is that the security forces, having deluded themselves about the nature of her activities could not just apologise and let her go, but had to press charges.
9/11 does not excuse that. It really does not excuse turning ourselves into moral monsters.
Well since you think she wanted it to look like a bomb, why did she make it look like a flashing LED display in the shape of a star instead.
If I ever want to make something look like a bomb, I will make something that looks like a bomb. But that is me.
And because that is what she is charged with she must be guilty, I guess, even though the hoax isn't much of a hoax because instead of trying to make something that actually looked like a bomb she made this star shaped light thing that doesn't actually look much like a bomb.
Of course she is so smart that she should have known that dumb idiots would think the think that wasn't supposed to look like a bomb would think it looks like a bomb.
So it is all her fault, because she should have known that the security forces that are supposed to deal with bombs was never trained to know what one looked like either.
You are still an idiot.
Earth to jim35 - it wasn't a fake bomb.
“I agree. She’s brilliant.”
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Yes, her Idiocy Quotient is right up in the stratosphere.
You know we use words because they mean things. She didn't flee, she didn't run away. She left. No they didn't "detain" her. They surrounded her with automatic weapons and threatened to blow her brains out if she moved. Apparently they did not actually want an explanation, since once it turned out not to be a real bomb they charged her withing having a fake bomb, but it wasn't that either.
How about the notion that the girl is legally innocent of that which you are accusing her of being guilty of, even though you apparently don't know enough about a bomb to know what one doesn't look like either.
“That looks as much like a bomb as an apple. The security guards are morons.”
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TalonDJ, the TSA folks are not paid to be smart, they are paid to protect your smarmy, skinny little butt.
“To someone of her brains it is hard to fathom that anyone could be so incredibly stupid to think breadboard with a few leds is a bomb. Sometimes it is hard to think down to that level.”
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Hillary, I didn’t realize you visited Free Republic!!
“My intent was not to be mean but to comment on the reactive response that these LEOs consistently display around here......pavlovian response: LED = bomb/ good cop = donut.
Your attack is also very predictable I suggest that you work on perfecting your speechlessness.”
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Chuck? Chuck Schumer? I haven’t heard from you since, gosh, how long now?
“I really hate to think where this new injunction, “thou shalt not cause alarm” may take us.”
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For many, many years, there has been a law against “inducing panic.” Only current, or latent, anarchists would have big problems with a law like this.
Are you current or latent?
Rush Limbaugh has it about right when he refers to a skull full of mush. We need to raise the voting age to 25 unless you served in the military. They have no clue about anything as a rule, but are convinced we are all crazy but them. Dangerous!
Actually, my problem is different and concerns itself with the complete mediocrity of what passes for critical thinking in the US which you demonstrate to a "t."
Your problem starts with your reverence for the expertise of the security forces, state troopers in this case, at the airport even though these guys clearly did not have much training on the subject, but because they have a badge and a gun you revere them. I don't want to deride them. They have a job to do and work hard and it sucks dealing with the public.
But let me clue you in on a little secret. There are genuine experts on the subject of bombs and explosives here in the US. But they have advanced degrees (I mean PhD leve l for the most part) in chemistry and physics and work at laboratories where they deal with high explosives, its formulation, its behaviour all day every day.
The result of this intellectual mediocrity is that you deride a girl who built something that doens't look like a bomb because it wasn't intended to be one, and think she must be dumb to think she could dupe the really smart guys who stand security by building something that was not a bomb and not meant to look like a bomb when they know that it was meant to look like a bomb even though they don't know it doesn't look like a bomb. That one might reach a different set of conclusions from the fact that smart people go to MIT and tend not to become state troopers seems to be rejected by you completely out of hand.
Let me give you a clue. There are some things you have to go to some place like MIT to understand because some things are really hard and you need to be really smart to understand. Despite your smarminess, some of those things are vital to our national security, much more important to our national security than the posturing around here about 9/11 being an excuse for shooting American girls on sight before questions are asked because you never know when the craze of becoming jihadists will hit teenage American girls, even though there is no evidence that it has.
And I don't believe that this goof-ball should go to prison because she didn't yet know how really dumb our security folks an their enablers like you can be.
“I presume that they actually pretty quickly determined that this girl didn’t have a bomb. Idiots could not just let it go at that.”
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Yeah, just like Richard Reid.
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